Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hronek, Richard Matthew Morgan

Titel

Increasingly Soft-Boiled!? Kemal Kayankaya’s Transformation from Hard-Boiled Loner to Bourgeois Father-To-Be in Jakob Arjouni’s Kayankaya Series

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation, a study of Jakob Arjouni’s Kayankaya series (1985-2012), focusses on the significance of the detective as an outsider and the extent to which Kemal Kayankaya, Arjouni’s protagonist, fits into that role. While focusing on how Kayankaya does or does not belong, the study relates the detective’s opposing desires for order (e.g., crime solving, domestic stability) and chaos (e.g., violence, drunkenness, sexual titillation) to Nietzsche’s theory of the Apollonian and Dionysian. In doing this, the dissertation reveals some of Arjouni’s strategies for isolating his detective while also making Kayankaya appear stereotypically German. Chapter One introduces the series and establishes the genre conventions of hard-boiled detection. Several scholars refer to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in their analyses of Arjouni. The works in which these detectives appear serve as a backdrop for the study on Kayankaya. Chapter Two surveys the scholarship on Kayankaya to date. This chapter presents an overview of findings so far by identifying major themes amongst the publications on Kemal Kayankaya. After presenting this overview, I lay out the goals for this dissertation. Chapter Three deals with Kayankaya the outsider and how Arjouni demonstrates Kayankaya’s isolation. To emphasize Kayankaya’s alterity (predicated on his Turkish appearance within Germany), Arjouni’s minor characters use deixis to exclude Kayankaya, stereotypes to classify him, and associate him with waste and decay. Comparing Arjouni’s works to Hammett’s and Chandler’s shows that while all of these detectives are outsiders, their unbelonging is defined along different lines. This distinction undergirds my observation that Kayankaya simultaneously belongs and does not belonging. Chapter Four explores how Arjouni uses hard-boiled motifs of drunkenness, violence, and sexual titillation to present Kayankaya escaping his unbelonging. I argue that the younger Kayankaya escapes his sense of seclusion by drinking excessively and subjecting himself to intense violence. Indeed, this violence is the most acceptable form of physical intimacy that Kayankaya can resort to, a trait that he shares with his American forebears. As the series continues, though, Kayankaya develops a community. This belonging decreases his need for drink and brutality, making him less hard-boiled in the conventional sense.